Sandy and Angela find a spot to lie down and sleep. Humphrey returns to the car. Jim climbs to the top of the knoll and watches the boats at sea, the moon and its flying clouds, the rough town map below him, defined by its tumbledown walls. Again he’s filled with some feeling he can’t name, some complex of feelings. “The land,” he says, speaking to the Aegean. “It’s not abandoned after all. Fishing, goat keeping, some kind of agriculture on the other side of the valley. Empty-looking, but used as much as scrubland can be. After all these many years.” He tries to imagine the amount of human suffering contained in a hundred and thirty-seven generations, the disappointments, illnesses, deaths. Generation after generation into dust. Or the myriad joys: how many festivals, parties, weddings, love trysts, in this little city-state? How often had someone sat on this knoll through a moony night, watching clouds scud by and thinking about the world? Oh, it makes him shiver to think of it! It’s a hilltop filled with spirits, and they’re all inside him.

He tries to imagine someone sitting on top of Saddleback, to look across the empty plain of OC. Ah, impossible. Unimaginable.

How could history have coursed so differently for these two dry coasts? It’s as if they’re not part of the same history, they are separated by such a great chasm; how to make any mental juncture? Are they different planets, somehow? It is too strange, too strange. Something has gone wrong back home in his country.

He sits there through the night, dozing once, waking to the boats puttering back in, dozing again. He dreams of rams and fallen walls, of his father and licorice sticks, of a bright lantern under a cloudy moon.

He wakes to a dawn as pink as the sunset was orange, a woven texture of cloud over him. Pink on blue. In the bay below Angela is swimming lazily. She stands on the smooth pebble bottom and walks out of the water, wet, sleek, supple. It’s the dawn of the world.

A little later a pickup truck drives slowly down the road, honking its horn. A horde of sheep and goats come tumbling out of the hills at this signal, baaing and clanging their bells. Feeding time! Far up the valley someone is burning trash.

Well, Angela has to be back to work in a couple of days, and so they have to start back home. Reluctantly they pack up. Jim takes a last walk over the site. He surveys the scene from his hilltop. Something about this place … “They’re part of the land, it’s not abandoned. The story’s not over here. It’ll go on as long as anything else.” Humphrey honks. Time to go. “Ah, California.…”

Chapter 46

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